Local novelist faces her own plot twists

Elle Newmark took an unusual route to getting her books published. (Steven Rothfeld)

The phone rang at 6 a.m. Elle Newmark, just out of the shower, raced to answer it, dripping and clutching a towel.

“Are you sitting down?” her book agent asked.

“Yes,” Newmark replied, but she was lying. She was too nervous to sit down.

For most of her life — she was 60 — she’d dreamed of being a writer. She’d done three novels that nobody wanted to publish, accumulated what she called “an epic collection” of rejection slips. She felt like a failure.

The Valley Center grandmother had even paid thousands of dollars to self-publish one of her rejects, “Bones of the Dead,” a tale about a chef’s apprentice in 15th Century Venice. And, tapping skills from an earlier career in advertising, she'd organized a virtual book-launch party for herself on the Internet.

She thought if she could get people to visit her party web site and show them a good time with music, conversation (witty quotes from famous people) and party favors (free e-book, art and recipe downloads), she might sell a few hundred copies of "Bones." That would boost her ranking on Amazon and attract even more buyers.

She baked 1,500 cookies and mailed them to dozens of website owners, offering them advertising space at her party if they would forward the book-launch invitation to their subscribers. She wound up with hundreds of thousands of invitees.

Her son suggested at the last minute she invite book agents and editors to the party, too. Newmark scoffed. Contacting them so brazenly — this just isn’t done. There’s a protocol: polite query letters, carefully-followed submission guidelines, silent waiting.

But Newmark had tried all that before and gotten nowhere. What did she have to lose? She went online and found the email addresses of 400 agents and editors. The night before her party, she clicked the “send” button.

By noon the next day, there was a frenzy. Agents and editors clamored for the book, offered her publishing deals on the spot. Within 24 hours she’d signed with the William Morris agency.

“Nowadays, everybody is looking not just for tremendously good books but tremendously good authors,” said Dorian Karchmar, Newmark’s agent. “The book itself was absolutely luminous, and this was somebody who would bring all of her own resources to bear to make it a success. Her party was so original, so well-organized.”

Two weeks later, an auction was held in New York to sell the publishing rights to “Bones of the Dead.” The bidding was supposed to start at 8 a.m. West Coast time.

At 6 a.m., the phone rang.

“Are you sitting down?” her agent asked.

Simon & Schuster. A two-book deal. A million dollars.

A happy ending, right?

Not so fast.

Powering through

Renamed “The Book of Unholy Mischief,” her novel was released in December 2008 and got good reviews in important places (The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus). The rights were sold in a dozen foreign countries.

Newmark toured the United States and Europe to promote the book in early 2009. In Venice, she wore a blue-velvet Renaissance dress to a dinner party where the waiting guests greeted her with applause and flashing cameras. She was starring in her own fairy tale.

A month later, while working on her follow-up book, “The Sandalwood Tree,” her back started hurting. She thought it was because she was pushing so hard to meet her deadline.

“I just figured I’d power through it and then I’d let myself get sick,” Newmark said.

Sick she got. Her gall bladder had calcified and infection spread. What should have been a simple surgery to remove it turned complicated. She aspirated, and two days later stopped breathing.

She was on a ventilator for three weeks, got better, then relapsed. She was in and out of the hospital five times with acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening lung condition.

“I basically lost all of 2010,” she said.

“Sandalwood Tree,” a tale of love and war set in India, was published earlier this month. She should be out promoting it, basking in the glow of fans who love her sensory storytelling or who find inspiration in her determination to be a writer. She should be enjoying the dream that came true.

Instead she’s at home, struggling to breathe, on hospice care.

“People have been known to be on hospice a very long time, and I’m hoping I can crank out another book,” Newmark said. “It’s equally possible that I go tomorrow.”

There’s nothing about her medical condition in the publicity material for the new book, or on her website (ellenewmark.com). She writes historical fiction, not Greek tragedy.

Besides, she doesn’t see it as a tragedy.

“I have nothing to complain about,” she said. “You ask me the one overriding feeling I will have at the end of my life and it’s gratitude. I’ve had a charmed life as far as I’m concerned.”

She still remembers the day when she was 10 years old and looked up at puffy white clouds floating over Chicago. “That’s a marshmallow sky,” she thought, tickled at the image she’d created in her mind and turned into words.

That’s when she knew she wanted to be a writer.

Wanting and being are different things, of course, and for Newmark life happened first. She married, had two kids, got divorced. To pay the bills she worked in advertising. On the side, she dabbled with fiction.

It wasn’t until she turned 43 that she really tried to write. She had remarried and was living in Germany with her physician husband. “It was my birthday and I wondered how I got so old so fast,” she said. She wrote a short story about noticing for the first time her own mortality.

More short stories followed. When she finally wrote one she thought was good enough to publish, she sent it off to a magazine, which turned her down. Many more rejections followed, "but I couldn't stop writing," she said.

She and her husband, Frank, moved to Valley Center to be near family, and in 1993 she wrote her first book. It won a “best unpublished novel” prize in a local competition. She felt encouraged enough to write another one.

That was “Bones of the Dead.”

An epitaph

It’s ironic to her that after wanting for so long to become a published author, that’s not what’s most important anymore. The doing is everything.

“Writing is my passion and passion is our consolation for mortality,” she said. “Real success is finding something you love and doing the hell out of it.”

Working on the final revisions to "Sandalwood Tree" was healing to her, she said — gave her a reason to live.

So when frustrated writers email her, as they often do, she tells them, “Don’t give up. Don't let anyone take away your passion, whether or not it ever pays you a dime.”

"Sandalwood Tree" begins with a quote from one of its characters: “Death steals everything but our stories.” It might be Elle Newmark's epitaph.

“Our stories can be inspiring or they can be cautionary tales, but after the will has been read and the loot distributed, your story is all that is left,” she said. “I hope to leave a story worth telling.”